Page 3 of A Rugged Beauty
The name settled in place, too. Along with a clear memory of a young girl with medium brown skin with copper undertones and her hair in a kerchief. Sparkling, mischievous eyes.
Flora.
But when the woman tried to ask her memory-friend what her own name was, the memory faded.
If the woman was comfortable in the city, what was she doing out on this prairie, alone?
The man’s coat beckoned as if it could answer.
Again the thought stuck. Maybe she wasn’t alone.
“H-hello?” she called out softly.
A noise came from deeper in the woods, a breaking branch. The woman wheeled and strained her eyes to see, but only the wind rustled the leaves.
Something shifted to her left. What she’d taken for a part of the landscape, a brown mass, moved.
A man.
He wore pants the color of earth, and a shirt, once white, now streaked with mud. That’s why she had thought him part of the ground.
A slight groan spilled from him as he rolled from where he’d curled around himself to splay flat on his back. His skin was darker than hers, a rich brown. From several feet away, she saw his hands were used to work, calloused and strong.
Who was he? His face was turned from her. A hat lay several feet beyond him.
Again she wondered, friend or foe?
She didn’t know the answer.
And then his head turned. When he opened his eyes, he was looking right at her.
The man had only a moment to notice the young woman’s wide, shocked eyes. Dark eyes. Her hair caught up behind her head, though wisps of curls framed her face. Her dress and the apron she wore over it wrinkled as if they had been soaked and dried while crumpled in a ball. Her tawny skin was kissed with a faint undertone of pink, as if she had been out in the sun too long.
Something tugged at him, a pull of familiarity that seemed at odds with the suspicious narrowing of her eyes.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
Then a pause, the length of one heartbeat. He didn’t know the answer to her question.
“Who are you?” he countered.
She was hovering behind a fallen, decaying tree as if she feared him, though he remained flat on the ground.
“I asked you first.” The tilt of her chin that might mean stubbornness. Yes. Stubborn.
He felt an ache at the base of his skull, and when he raised one hand to rub it, she flinched. The pain bloomed and expanded to a dull roar in his head.
“Did you poison me?” Something in his throat and mouth tasted wrong. His body felt weak, a feeling he associated with surviving a fatiguing fever.
The narrowing of her eyes intensified, a frown pulling at her mouth. He had one stray thought that her features weren’t used to the expression. How could he know that about her, when he didn’t even know her name? Or his own?
“If I did, I poisoned the both of us.” Her mouth took on a determined slant. “I can’t remember a thing,” she admitted softly.
That was not good. He didn’t know how they had come to be here, wherever here was. And he didn’t know this woman.
When he sat up, she took several shuffling steps backward.
He took in the campfire, now cold. A quick glance around the small clearing showed no other supplies.
